Heretofore, there has been known a construction machine including a lower traveling body and an upper slewing body mounted on the lower traveling body, the upper slewing body having, in addition to an engine compartment housing a specific device which includes an engine, a central foothold serving as a foothold for performing maintenance on the device in the engine compartment, and a maintenance access passage serving as an access passage to the central foothold. This type of the construction machine having the central foothold and the maintenance access passage is disclosed, for example, in JP 2010-47975A (Patent Literature 1), JP 2010-150835A (Patent Literature 2) and JP 5106711B (Patent Literature 3).
However, each of construction machines described in the above Literatures includes discontinuity between a maintenance access passage and a central foothold in a front-rear direction, thereby involving a problem of forcing a worker to move in an irregular manner including oblique or transverse movement in a boundary region between the maintenance access passage and the central foothold. Specifically, following walking up the maintenance access passage, e.g., linearly, the worker has to turn rightward or obliquely rightward in order to transfer to the central foothold. Particularly, in the case of a stair-like maintenance access passage, the worker is more likely to be unbalanced, upon transit from the stair-like maintenance access passage to the central foothold, because of different walk from that during stair-climbing; hence, making the discontinuous transverse or oblique movement during such transit is likely to cause the worker's posture to be more unstable.
The Patent Literatures 2 and 3 disclose extending the maintenance access passage so as to locate a rear edge of an upper end portion of the maintenance access passage at a rear side of a front edge of the central foothold to thereby form a region in which the maintenance access passage and the central foothold are continuous with each other in a right-left direction; the region for transit between the maintenance access passage and the central foothold, however, still requires a transverse movement including an oblique movement.
Moreover, significant extension of the maintenance access passage, which is originally required to be formed within a limited space, is likely to involve difficulty in disposing other equipment.